Your browser does not support native audio, but you can download this MP3 to listen on your device.

Journalists have always used statistics and numbers to tell stories, but never before have we had access to the sheer volumes of data available in today’s digital world. This evening we speak to John Bohannon, a science journalist at the forefront of a reportage genre known as data journalism. Also a molecular biologist at Harvard University, Bohannon’s work has been featured in publications like Science and Wired. In 2011, he published a report that made sense of the huge disparities in civilian casualty data that was coming in from various sources, on the war in Afghanistan. In 2013, he wrote an exposé on the peer-review process for scientific journals in the open-access world and earlier this year, he fooled millions into thinking Chocolate Helps Weight loss. We managed to catch up with him in June, at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea, where we asked him to give us a brief description of how he went from molecular biology to journalism.